Saturday, November 16, 2013

Obama discovers that business is complicated and government is incompetent

Many have noticed the contrast between the technological mastery of Obama's presidential campaigns and Obamacare's IT disaster. In yesterday's press conference (full transcript here), Pres. Obama explains some lessons learned:

[O]ur IT systems, how we purchase technology in the federal government
is cumbersome, complicated and outdated. And so this isn’t a situation
where — on my campaign, I could simply say, who are the best folks out
there, let’s get them around a table, let’s figure out what we’re doing
and we’re just going to continue to improve it and refine it and work on
our goals.

If you’re doing it at the federal government level, you know, you’re
going through, you know, 40 pages of specs and this and that and the
other and there’s all kinds of law involved. And it makes it more
difficult — it’s part of the reason why chronically federal IT programs
are overbudget, behind schedule.

Obama discovers that the Federal government is a big non-functional bureaucracy bound up in red tape. Surprise! One might have thought that this is the kind of thing he should have considered putting 1/6th of the US economy under the control of a website to be built by the same Federal IT people who he now knows are "chronically" "overbudget" and "behind schedule."

Separate from IT, Obama discovered something about the health insurance:

What we’re discovering is that part of the problem has been technology,
hardware and software, and that’s being upgraded. But even if we get the
— the hardware and software working exactly the way it’s supposed to
with relatively minor glitches, what we’re also discovering is that
insurance is complicated to buy. And another mistake that we made, I
think, was underestimating the difficulties of people purchasing
insurance online and shopping for a lot of options with a lot of costs
and lot of different benefits and plans and — and somehow expecting that
that would be very smooth, and then they’ve also got to try to apply
for tax credits on the website.

Obama has discovered that health insurance is complicated, maybe too complicated to fit into a website. Who would have thought so? As a candidate, Obama promised to slow "the rise of the oceans" and to heal "the planet." Five years later, he has discovered that a mere website to sell insurance is beyond his skills.

The politics of liberalism is founded on naivety and Obama excels at it.